EMBO Practical Course on Computational Structural Biology

The course will aim to teach computational aspects of protein structure determination, validation and analysis. It will cover the background of X-ray crystallography, Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy, Electron Microscopy and Small-angle X-ray scattering and provide hands-on experience in building a model from X-ray diffraction data, comparing and integrating different types of structural data, and the differences in interpretation. Subsequent days will teach the students to critically examine and validate data from these techniques and from available databases such as the Protein Data Bank and ChEMBL and use a variety of analysis tools to identify similarities that can help identify function. The course will also provide an introductory session to homology modeling for use with proteins less amenable to structure determination. In addition, the importance of protein structure to drug development will be illustrated with sessions on small molecules and model validation. The course is aimed at PhD students and post-docs working on the collection and analysis of protein structure data. The goal is to provide them with insight into the protein structure determination process, how to critically assess the quality of data from models, and to provide expertise in the integration and visualisation of data from different techniques, thus allowing the analysis of protein structure data for functional relationships.

(Courtesy of European Molecular Biology Laboratory, Hamburg, via universitiesnews.com)